“Poor little thing!” said Madeline. “She is so small. I hope she will grow to be something like a mate for Dick.”
“Do not flatter yourself with wishes,” cried Mrs. Lenox. “There’s only one soil in which the soul can grow, and that is love. Unless I misread her, there is no room in her for anything but Lena Quincy Percival.”
“And yet,” objected Ellery, “she is certainly not a person weighted with intellect. I should say she is all impulse and emotion.”
“Anomalous but by no means uncommon, Mr. Norris,” she rejoined. “All emotion, yet without emotion of the heart. In her little world, self lies at the equator, and every one else is pushed off to the frozen poles.”
The others looked at her doubtfully.
“Don’t you think I have studied her? She has been a bald revelation to me of things I have only half understood in better-bred women. She’s like a weed transplanted from her lean ground to a garden and grown more luxuriant in her weediness. Do you know what I think? I believe that when the last judgment shall strip her of her sweet pink flesh, there will be nothing found inside but a little dry kernel, too hard to bite, and labeled ‘self’.”
“You are positively vicious, Vera,” said her husband gravely.
The tears came to her eyes as she turned to him.
“I really loved Dick, and she has stung him.”
“But all this does not explain her hatred for Madeline.”